Dr Vino's wine blog

Jay McInerney, author of Bright Lights, Big City among other works of fiction, has been named WSJ wine columnist according to a tweet from Ray Isle, wine editor of Food & Wine magazine.

McInerney wrote a monthly wine column at House & Garden until Condé Nast shuttered the magazine in 2007. His columns were compiled in two books, Bacchus & Me (amazon, aff) and The Hedonist in the Cellar (amazon, aff). So here’s one wine writer who was able to find a job again!

In 2006, he married Anne Hearst. With that kind of financial fusion, perhaps he will buy his own wine instead of the Journal picking up the tab?

McInerney will replace John Brecher and Dorothy Gaiter who ended twelve years as wine columnists in December. Their popular column had a populist slant, periodically reviewing white zinfandel, wine on cruise ships, at Disney World and their annual, participatory “open that bottle night.” By contrast, McInerney, whose punchy column ended before the recession took hold, frequently wrote about fine and collectible wines.

Robert Parker states that his publication, The Wine Advocate, purchases “more than 60%” of the wines that it reviews. Parker previously said that he paid for 75 percent of the wines, but amid the furor last year over the free trips that two of his contributors, Jay Miller and Mark Squires, had accepted, he scaled back that figure. However, many people wonder if even the revised figure is true. After all, The Wine Advocate reviews thousands of wines a year (16,474 wines last year), and more than a few of them are extremely expensive. Also, Parker now has six contributing writers, all of whom are presumably drawing salaries from The Wine Advocate.

In 2006, Parker’s assistant, Joan Passman, told a New York Times reporter that Parker purchased bottles “on occasion” but that “by far the largest portion” of wines he sampled were free samples. (Parker publicly dismissed her assertion, saying she had “no clue as to whether I spend a dollar or a million dollars on wines to be tasted.”) In the related article, Marvin Shanken admitted that the Wine Spectator, which has many more subscribers and much higher revenues than the Wine Advocate, was dependent on free samples. “It’d be economically impossible to buy all those wines, especially the ones that are $100 to $300 to $500 a bottle,” he said. During the Miller/Squires flap, Parker seemed to suggest that shouldering the travel expense could lead him to “sacrifice” coverage of some areas. If that travel cost is too much to bear, it certainly seems reasonable to wonder if Parker is really buying as much wine as he claims.

To find out what the Wine Advocate spends on wine according to the stated policy, I crunched the numbers from Read more…

SPIT: controlled storage
James, who has taken a couple of classes of mine in the past year, wrote that he recently pulled the cork on a 1974 Heitz, Martha’s Vineyard for his 50th birthday and it was drinking fabulously. I asked him when he got the wine and he replied, “It was stored in a number of different environments since I had the wine since college in 1978. It was stored in my dormitory, then in my parents basement, then in my apartments, then in a controlled storage facility, and finally in a wine storage cooler. And it still turned out to be the best wine I have ever tasted.” Most excellent!

SIPPED: musical chairs
Jay Miller publicly states that he will no longer be reviewing Australian wines for the Wine Advocate. In other news, Wolfgang Weber, a senior editor at Wine & Spirits magazine and Italian wine critic, has announced that he will be leaving the magazine to join a boutique wine sales and marketing firm. In neither case has a successor been officially named. UPDATE: W&S Editor and Publisher Josh Greene writes in to say that he will be resuming the role of Italian wine critic for the magazine. UPDATE: Lisa Perrotti-Brown, based in Singapore, will be reviewing the wines of Australia (and New Zealand) for the Wine Advocate.

SPIT: blogging
John Mariani, a longtime wine and food writer, predicts a rise in vapid wine blogs. Sigh. We’ve seen this movie before. A more bold and original prediction would have been: The quality of blogs increases as journalists have fewer outlets. [Bloomberg]

NOT SIPPED: Johnny Apple’s wine
Betsey, widow of legendary NYT reporter Johnny Apple, will put his wine collection up for auction. The story repeatedly mentions his “enviably enormous expense account.” To which a former NYT executive editor says: “Johnny Apple would be impossible today, unfortunately.” Gawker reacts.

SPIT: alcohol
A buzz without inebriation? Instant sobriety? Such are the claims of an alcohol substitute being developed by Professor David Nutt, sacked as the UK government’s drug adviser last year. Should wine be threatened? Not if it is considered a food! [Telegraph]

SIPPED: kind words
The Winnipeg Free Press included this blog in their year-end roundup of notables. And my book, Wine Politics, receives a strong review in the current issue of the food journal, Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture. See the review here or more reviews on the new book review page.

“This is our 579th—and last—”Tastings” column. The past 12 years—a full case!—have been a joy, not because of the wine but because we had an opportunity to meet so many of you, both in person and virtually. Thank you.”

That was how John Brecher and Dorothy Gaiter concluded their column in today’s WSJ. They don’t elaborate on their future plans; No editor’s note appears to indicate what will happen with wine coverage at country’s highest circulation newspaper.

When John and Dottie, as they were known to their readers, started writing the column, both came from news sections of the paper as opposed to wine, food or criticism. They asserted their independence from the trade, purchasing wines for review at retail and tasting them blind at home, with dinner over several nights. They rated wines on a scale of “Yech”, “OK”, “Good”, “Very Good”, “Delicious” to “Delicious!” Their column was often very personal, touching on wine in their family experiences, such as vacations on cruise ships or at Disney World. Indeed, their final column is a clarion call for how context influences the wines we drink.

But their signal contribution to wine writing was Open That Bottle Night, encouraging readers to pull a symbolically significant bottle from their cellar and open it just for the heck of it on the last Saturday in February. Readers then sent in letters with their experiences that John & Dottie rounded up in a subsequent column. It was inspired and interactive. And it won them legions of fans.

Best of luck to them in their future endeavors.

SIPPED: number crunching
Wineries that advertise in Wine Spectator have their wines score better–but only by less than one point. Such is the finding in the lead article in the new issue of the Journal of Wine Economics. See the whole paper here as pdf or a blog reaction from the journal’s editor or a hard-hitting response from Robin Goldstein. The quantitative study looks only at reviews and does not examine the editorial, art, restaurant awards, or the Top 100 for advertiser bias. WS editor Tom Matthews responds to the research.

SPIT: binge drinking; SIPPED: wine tasting
An elite girls’ school in England has a new approach to tackling the problem of binge drinking: wine tastings. “We want to introduce the girls and their friends to good wines and their complexity, and educate them to develop an interest in the making of the wines rather than them seeing wine as something that you knock back in the summer holidays without thinking.” Revolutionary!! [The Indepdent; ht @candidwines]

SPIT: closures
Francis Ford Coppola’s winery produced a wine dubbed “encyclopedia” in a carafe-shaped bottle. The custom, oversized screwcaps leaked and ruined 55,000 cases of the wine, the winery alleges in a lawsuit filed against the screwcap’s manufacturer, Vinocor. [Bloomberg]

SPIT: pre-selling wine
Some California wineries are going all Rioja and consciously holding wines back for bottle aging–sometimes a decade or more–at the winery. [NYT]

SPIT: “me-too” wines
The New Zealand wine industry faces challenges, as bulk exports rise and prices fall. The NYT writes that the country’s vintners are “desperate to avoid the fate of neighboring Australia.”

Over Thanksgiving, I finally read Raffi Khatchadourian’s 10,000 word essay in the Nov 23 issue of the New Yorker. Entitled “The Taste Makers,” Khatchadourian tracks a flavor scientist at a company called Givaudan, which makes such flavorings such as acai, pomegranate or kiwi-strawberry for bottled drinks. The author follows the Givaudan team to various locales where they smell, taste and capture molecular readouts of exotic fruit aromas. The team seriously geeks out over smells. The flavorists had this to say about wine tasting:

During a meeting with several flavor professionals in New Jersey, I compared a flavor chemist’s ability to break down the structure of a soft drink to the skills of Robert Parker, the wine critic. I was quickly corrected. “That’s kind of like hocus-pocus,” one of them said. “Parker may say that a wine has a nutty note or is oaky, but a lot of things can be behind that, and I don’t think he’s matching aspects of the flavor to a chemical compound and going, ‘O.K., this note here, it comes from methyl isobutyrate.’ ” And yet controlled experiments show that, no matter what a person’s professional vocabulary or expertise, aromas remain a blur: the average person, with minimal training, can perceive about three or four distinct components in a given aroma; professional flavorists-without leaning on their chemical knowledge of particular types of food-can do no better.

The article also provided a primer about sensory perception and brain function, noting that unlike sights and sounds, smells bypass the thalamus. So maybe our hard wiring is why we will never be wine-tasting robots, with pesky things like emotions and context getting in the way.

Smells, for the most part, are fed directly from the nose to a “pre-semantic” part of the brain where cognition does not occur, and where emotions are processed. The bypassing of the thalamus may be one reason why smells can be so hard to describe in detail, and also why aromas stimulate such powerful feelings. The smell of rotten meat can trigger sudden revulsion in a way that merely looking at it cannot.

Related: “WSJ: wine-rating system is badly flawed“

When Gary Vaynerchuk asked me on the “thunder show” I was afraid. Not of him even though he’s an entrepreneur, wine retailer, dynamo, and internet phenom. No, I was afraid he would make me eat dirt. (As he made Conan do.)

In the end, that didn’t happen and there was nothing to fear. Not only is Gary a very nice guy, we had a fun conversation too. So if you have 33 minutes that you are wondering what to do with, check out the segment where we talk and taste three wines. (Or see it on his site.) Gary also has a couple of books out, 101 Wines and a business book called Crush It. If you don’t know about Gary you can check out profiles of him in Slate and NYTimes.com.

Feel free to post your thoughts in the comments as well as your answer to The Question: will you be pouring a magnum on Thanksgiving?

Saturday’s WSJ catches up with Robert Hodgson’s research on the randomness of gold medals in wine competitions. In case you missed our discussion here and many others on them there internets, you can check out the WSJ article for a recap. The story also applies the discussion to wine ratings and scores, underscoring their inherent subjectivity even though pallets of wine are bought and sold every day on these snapshots.

The author, Leonard Mladinow, wrote a book last year called “The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules or Lives” (amazon; aff). In it, he has a brief section on inherent subjectivity and variation in wine descriptions and ratings. He points out the importance of aggregating several reviews and then expressing the standard deviation with the final score, as in “90 points, plus or minus 6.” Think that would fly in a sales email? Yeah, me either. But a site of user-generated reviews, such as cellartracker, could easily calculate a mean score and standard deviation from the reviews on any given wine in their database. It may not be ever-so-slightly more difficult to read than a single number but it would be a big score for accuracy in reflecting user experiences across diverse settings.

Anyway, check out the article. Here’s one quote for the candor file, from the publisher of a magazine that uses scores: “It is absurd for people to expect consistency in a taster’s ratings. We’re not robots.”

“A Hint of Hype, A Taste of Illusion” WSJ
(Image: a reduced size crop of an image credited to Chris Wadden that ran with the story)

SIPPED: the hard question; SPIT: advertorial
During what looked like an innocuous segment on Thanksgiving wines, Evan Dawson, a local TV news anchor, asks Leslie Sbrocco, wine book author and TV host, some tough questions. And they’re not about the turkey. Tune in to about 1:50 when he asks her about the Beringer wines she recommends: “Do you have a relationship with them that involves any sort of compensation?” Her reply: “Yes, this media tour is with the Beringer portfolio of wines.” The FTC would be proud of Dawson! [13WHAM]

SPIT: double standards
Speaking of the FTC, Blake Gray, former wine columnist for the SF Chronicle, has a lengthy post decrying the fact that the new FTC regulations come down harder on blogs than they do traditional media. [Gray Market Report]

SIPPED: funding freer trade
Frustrated by interstate shipping laws that thwart the ability to purchase wine out of state for 47 states? Consider bidding on wine lots in an auction to benefit the Specialty Wine Retailers Association, which fights legal battles for freer trade.

SIPPED: red wine
Chocolate milk, of all drinks, tries to muscle red wine out of the health news headlines: According to recent research as reported in the NYT, “flavanoid-rich cocoa” found in chocolate milk appears more effective at reducing inflammation that leads to atherosclerosis than regular milk! But the effects still aren’t as pronounced as with red wine. I can see it now: the choco-cabernet smoothie!

SIPPED: symbolic pricing
Joe Montana’s 500 acre estate that spans the Sonoma-Napa county line, is up for sale. The former 49ers QB, who also has a wine label, listed the property at $49 million. [WSJ]

SPIT: symbolic pricing
7-Eleven, the chain of 15,000 convenience stores, has announced their own wine label, Yosemite Road. Instead of pricing it at $7 and $11 a bottle for symbolic purposes, it will retail for $3.99. Aha! Maybe this will be the home of the choco-cabernet Slurpee? [AP]

SIPPED: another city winery
Hong Kong eclipsed New York City as the wine auction capital of the world this year, that we know. But this just in: Hong Kong has had a winery in the city limits since 2007. [CNN]

SIPPED: web voting
The website Foodbuzz recently distributed some blog awards and this blog won the category “blogger you would most want to be your personal sommelier.” Thank you for your votes but my question is, true to blogger stereotype, does that mean I have to pour wine in my pajamas? [Foodbuzz]